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So, last Sunday Mark and I went off to Helsinki for an invited visit to Planmeca Head-quarters and Manufacturing facilities.

We were invited by Karl O’Higgins, the UK MD of Planmeca. He picked me up from home on Sunday with Mark and we flew from Manchester airport.

My time with my family is very precious and I struggle travelling away because I miss them a lot, the paper work gets piled up and I don’t get to ride my bike, so to agree to a trip to Helsinki, which is a company that we have done no work with, was a big deal.

I went for two reasons, one of which is a big secret (which I will tell you about later) and the other was for CBCT in ultra-low dose, but Karl had arranged an agenda all through Monday and half of Tuesday which was extraordinary. We basically changed locations and presenter every 45 minutes for 36 hours.

It was full on.

It would be easy for me to tell you that the most impressive thing about the trip to Planmeca was the trip to the beachside facility and the tour of the Baltic Archipelago on a sun seeker drinking champagne with the sun going down; that was quite cool. It would be easy to tell you that it was only a good trip because Mark and I shared a sauna, and then we ran down the beach into the sea for a swim, but genuinely that bit of it, although nice, was a by-product to the main events.

One of the main events is restricted with a non-disclosure agreement (brought into place by me) and can’t be released for a little while but the other was two sessions on CBCT with two extraordinary people who opened my eyes and opened my mind to the possibilities going forwards of some incredible things.

In 2008 when Ludlo published some of the seminal work on CBCT dosing at the start of the CBCT revolution the Planmeca Promax 10x10 scan provided 652 microsieverts of radiation to a patient.

The new Promax provides 12.

In the space of 36 hours I saw 100’s of incredible things at Planmeca and none less than the people we saw on the production line making the chairs whose average time at the company is 12 ½ years.

None less than Jens who was our tour guide for the two days and was extraordinary, I never met anyone at Planmeca who wasn’t deeply proud of what they did, where they lived and where they worked.

This wasn’t a set up because I am always the one who will ask the difficult questions and ask why people work there, what they did before and why they’re there now.

Planmeca was founded 50 years ago, and the founder still turns up most days for work. You can tell by the minute he walks through the door.

Planmeca’s chairs aren’t made in China, they’re made in Helsinki about 3 minutes up the road from Helsinki.

They’re not made and stored in warehouses, they’re made to order; we watched them going down the production line. The CBCT machines are made in the same way.

The things that are coming down the track from Planmeca in digital software, intra oral scan capturing and CBCT will change the game in digital dentistry, at least for a while (the new 3D printer will be extraordinary).

It was a joy and an unforgettable experience, a privilege to do something like that as part of ‘your work’, but the last presentation was the one that cut the legs off me by the corporate Physicist Juha, a man that did a PhD in his 50’s so that he could make the product better.

He’s developed his own system for dose comparison and published it widely. He’s done work with Ludlo (now retired) and he is one of the most enthusiastic scientists I’ve ever met.

He knows exactly what he wants the machines to do and will pretty much stop at nothing to get them to do it. It’s all about what is best for the patient and therefore best for the clinician.

We had a good trip, more of my team will go there. Planmeca is a business that I would like my business to be 50 years from now.

Blog post number: 1676